Pavlova Plus One. Episode Two

Yesterday I went to the hospital for an ultrasound. The doctor smeared my belly with some odorless, tasteless goo, ran something like a mouse over the goo, and started talking about the lenses, lungs, heart valves, kidneys and brains of my daughter Sonya. Then he turned his computer monitor so I could see, and I saw a black-and-white see-through image of the Android in profile. The Android yawned and stuck its tongue out at me. «Sonya!» I exclaimed, nearly bursting into tears. «Looks like her dad, so she'll be a happy one,» said the doctor, and wiped my belly with a paper towel.
Once upon a time this belly was so flat that a whole McDonald's combo meal would hardly fit inside it. Yes, I admit, I could never quite finish the fries. This belly was so flat that after a wild weekend it would even go concave. That is, with a «minus» sign. It was a tanned belly, or at worst a belly gone yellow from a bad liver. Yes. Those were the days. And the things that happened to that belly, the places it sunbathed. Take last summer, for instance, I remember it sunbathing in Ibiza. A nice place, no complaints. Just wildly expensive. But I sorted that out fast. I went to Ibiza not alone but with my old friend Starikov, who had received a fee a week earlier. Given that he was the chief architect on some multi-storey apartment building in the center of Moscow, the fee was very, very hefty. So without a second thought we snagged tickets and flew off to Spain. And you know what? The much-praised Cafe Del Mar, the place everyone crams onto this island for, is the worst of anything you can find there. Because that lousy Cafe Del Mar has long been fouled up by some revolting types from the London suburbs, football-and-beer fans with sunburned red mugs, fat-thighed broads «over thirty» doing their best impression of our band Tatu, and some utterly degenerate types deranged from birth. That desecrated place reminded me of the seafront in Gelendzhik. The resorts of the Krasnodar region. But honestly, Ibiza was pretty boring. All we did was nearly drive off a cliff a couple of times in our rented car, because I never did learn to drive on the mountain switchbacks baked by the Spanish sun. Otherwise everything was within the norm: a well-fed, civilized holiday within the bounds of dance culture. Well, except that Kotov kept us entertained now and then: crashing his moped, or needing a lift to the club at two in the afternoon…
But a month earlier, when my flat belly went off to tan in Turkey, now that was an adventure. I, for one, barely made it back to the motherland, having been through the police, the gendarmerie, jail, and even a Turkish regional court. How did I manage that? Very simply. Some glossy magazine hired me, for whatever reason, to produce a fashion shoot. It had to be done on the Mediterranean coast near Antalya. Nothing original, it seemed to me. And that's always how it goes. The first alarm bell rang at Domodedovo, when it became clear that our film crew was flying on the same plane as TusArt. For those who haven't yet become a voluntary victim of this seasonal event, let me explain: it's a crowd of people, most of whom can be found on the pages of this site, who head off en masse to warm countries in order to… To have a good time. Soap bubbles, body art (bruises, bumps), an ocean of alcohol and turntables – those are the main landmarks for the participants of these so-called festivals. No, of course I understand that the organizers of these events were originally driven by far more ambitious intentions, but is there any other way with this crowd of moral degenerates? No, there isn't, especially when they're all together. Anyway, as I already wrote, TusArt was flying with us on the same plane. Zorkin and Harrison bought sixteen bottles of rum at Duty Free. When they were asked why so many, they were horrified and answered: «Are you kidding?! We've got a three-and-a-half-hour flight!!!». When the Coca-Cola ran out somewhere in the middle of the flight, things got hardcore. They started drinking the rum straight. How we landed, I don't remember, but at the Turkish airport our stylist Marat, completely out of his mind from the eventful flight, was grabbed by the face by some guy off a «Novosibirsk–Antalya» charter flight and laid out on the marble floor. Marat, who had dared to stare too intently at the hairstyle of the man's wife (I think such things used to be called a «khala»), feeling the cool marble against the back of his head, burst into curses, and a little brawl broke out. We were quickly escorted out of the airport and driven to the hotel. TusArt in full force went the other way, carrying off countless bottles of precious alcohol. We got worried, and for nothing. It turned out that the hotel they'd sent us to offered almost round-the-clock «all-inclusive» service. So the next day we woke up drunk. And in general, as far as I remember, we only woke up sober ten days later in Moscow. I have to admit, «all-inclusive» worked flawlessly.
Only in the morning did it come out that our bag had gone missing, with the documents, tickets, all the money, the American green card of my friend Berdichevskaya, who lives in Chicago, her credit card with a tidy sum on it, a 500-dollar mobile phone, an 800-dollar Palm Pilot with all its data, the keys to apartments, cars and steamships, and also the birth-control pills. About the last one Berdichevskaya lamented at full throttle, and I fully supported her in that. Pills are a serious matter.
That's how we ended up in the gendarmerie of the little town of Kemer. The gendarmes, unlike the local police, whom we disliked right away, turned out to be young, tall, handsome and incredibly friendly dudes. We even got worried: aren't they all faggots? The idea that at night they change clothes and perform in the travesty show of some plush Antalya nightclub appealed to us so much that we immediately started angling to get the guys to hang out with us. They gladly accepted our offer, promising to swing by in a couple of days when the weekend started. Then they treated us to tea and shashlik, summoned the representatives of our travel agency, the driver of the bus that had brought us from the airport to the hotel, the female escort with yellow broken toenails and shifty eyes, questioned everyone, but never did find the bag.
The next morning our shoot began. Photographer Pukhov informed us with horror that stylist Marat wouldn't be able to attend on account of his deepest bender. «Damned all-inclusive!» we said, and went off to the shoot without him.
When we got back, Marat was already gone. The worried hotel manager told us Marat was in intensive care. At the Kemer hospital we were informed that Marat had a most severe alcohol intoxication and something else. What exactly, they couldn't figure out, but that he'd been poisoned was certain. «In short, guys, your stylist is currently in a coma,» the local doctor Konovalov summed up in broken English. «Do something!» we pleaded, and a few hours later they handed us a living, trembling Marat. In his hands was a bill for a thousand and a half dollars for medical services. «For a grand and a half we'd sooner whack him and say that's how it was!» exclaimed Lyosha, the editor of the «fashion, beauty and health» section, shoving a crumpled hundred-dollar bill into the doctor's sweaty hands. The doctor, along with the nurses, was struck dumb by such gall and immediately called the gendarmes. But when they arrived and started hugging us, the medical staff realized they'd miscalculated and let us go, their greedy eyes flashing angrily.
And the next day the police arrested us. The shoot was taking place four hundred kilometers from the hotel, in a picturesque little spot with the dreadful name «Pamukkale». There, against the backdrop of the stunning beauty of snow-white mountains, blue mineral springs, a piercingly blue sky and ruins from the times of the Roman Empire, we were treated in the most humiliating manner for shooting something the Turkish police deemed pornographic. Berdichevskaya's bare tits, you see, had defiled their national honor and dignity (did it even exist?), and the absence of documents and large sums of money led the police to the idea of an immediate arrest. That's how we ended up in jail.
The night turned out hot. There was no food. There was only chifir, which the police called tea. There was neither a long-distance telephone nor a computer at the station. So they drew up the report in calligraphic handwriting, by hand, with carbon paper. That took them no less than two hours of painstaking labor. When they finished writing, we unanimously refused to sign that report, because it was written in Turkish. The police were seriously put out and promised us a trial, pointing at a portrait of the bushy-browed Atatürk. And that portrait, by the way, along with his life-size bronze bust, was there at the station, just like the red carpet leading to that altar. Fashion editor Lyosha nervously pointed at the inscription on the bas-relief, «1881», and giggled: «Nino Cerruti!». We laughed, and we were immediately locked up.
The next day in court it seemed to us that we'd landed in an early-seventies Indian film: the surroundings, the faces, the hairstyles, the clothes, the furniture and the people's behavior all suggested that time in this remote-from-civilization regional center had stopped and ran by its own laws. The typewriter clattered, the mustachioed judge said something to us, again in Turkish, a comely woman wrote out our fine, banging away with accountant's stamps. The cash desk was right there, in the courtroom. We were fined three hundred dollars. From the wall the stern and omnipresent Atatürk gazed down at us.
To recover at least a little from the shocks, we rented a road-battered jeep. We won't go into the details of our journey, but by some miracle we got wasted on alcohol again, and the next day lost the model Volodya. After a while we discovered the jeep was missing.
At the by-now-familiar Kemer hospital the whole staff gloated. «Now you won't escape retribution!» the dreadful doctor waved papers in front of our noses. This time our film-crew member was guarded by police. Old, fat and ugly, in awful worn-out uniforms and with the same greedy glint in their eyes, they surrounded poor Volodya and wouldn't let him move a hand or a foot. His arm was in a cast, and he could either lie down or stand. Volodya could no longer sit, because he'd broken his tailbone. «Went looking for trouble and found it, the beast!» I summed up.
Because Volodya was a little tipsy, the car insurance didn't kick in. We were catastrophically short of money and had to turn to a friendly magazine's editorial office. They told us to get lost. Then we turned to friends, and they too sent us to the same address. Calling relatives was scary, but there was absolutely nothing to be done, and they too got the chance to cheerfully tell us to get lost, which they didn't fail to do at our very first cry for financial help. And on top of that model Katya cracked: she confessed she'd never stayed in an «all-inclusive» hotel, and had sinfully assumed it meant «you can call Saratov». In short, she got hit with a phone bill. Our expenses were already measured in the thousands. And considering that because of jail we'd missed our plane, and the travel agency, mindful of the summons to the gendarmerie, didn't want to give us free tickets, our situation was simply monstrous. In short, we all ganged up on model Katya, and out of fear she talked her Saratov fiancé into wiring her money.
When we got to the local Western Union branch, it turned out that Katya's fiancé had put the naive «Katya» in the «name» field, instead of the passport «Ekaterina». «He must be a model too!» we guessed, but Katya proudly informed us that he was a businessman. Somehow we managed to talk the bank employees into giving us the cash. On the way to the hotel the taxi with model Katya and hairdresser Mitrofanova got into a horrific accident. The cab driver was ogling Katya, missed the turn, lost control, and slammed full-force into a rock. The girls were glad they'd saved money. The cab driver was taken to our familiar hospital. The doctor with the greedy eyes had a serious business going.
As we were climbing the aircraft steps, the editor of the «fashion» section had a panic attack. «I've got it all figured out!» he exclaimed, «We haven't had a fire yet! I'm not flying anywhere! Go to hell!». The guy had to be talked into boarding the plane.
Not so much time has passed since then. Now I sit at home, smearing cream on my swollen nipples, and think: «Ah, I could really go for a trip to Turkey right now!». On the cream's packaging it says: «Healthy nipples – a happy baby». I can't help but agree with that statement.